When it is desired to apply a foil to compressed board or other substrate, which itself may be a laminate, for subsequent pressing of the resulting stack in a laminating press which can consolidate the substrate in the case of pressed board, the foil layer is generally drawn from a stack and transferred to a deposition station for application to the charge to be laminated with that foil before the resulting unit is fed to the press.
In such systems, a stack station can be provided with one or more stacks of the foil layers, hereinafter referred to as foil sheets, foils or, simply sheets, and the stacks of such foils are generally provided in vertically-spaced relationship, i.e. at a distance one above another.
Between the stack station and the deposition station, a suction beam is displaceable for removing a foil sheet from one of the stacks and depositing it upon the deposition station.
The suction beam can usually be swingable vertically to the height of the respective stack sheet so that it can withdraw the foil from one or another of the stacks thereof.
Between the stack station and the deposition station, a transfer platform can be provided.
The foil can be used as the outer foil or patterning, coloring or finishing member of a construction laminate, such as pressed board, especially chip board, fiber board or the like and can be the outermost layer for a paper stack or can be composed of paper, plastic-coated paper or the like which is printed or otherwise decorated. The pressed product is broadly referred to as a laminate and more than one foil can form part of the laminate. The foils, when laminated together, may be stacked in the same direction or in opposite or alternately transverse directions.
The earlier apparatus for this purpose provides between a stack station and the deposition station, a transport carriage for the suction beam and mounts the transport carriage on a rocker which can be swingable by a piston and cylinder arrangement.
Usually a plurality of servomotors and measuring and control devices are required to align the suction beam with a foil to be picked up and frequently spindle-type drives are required for positioning the suction beam. Reference may be had to German patent document DE 34 18 258.
For a number of reasons, these systems have been found to be excessively complex and costly both to make and operate. In addition, the reliability of such systems may require improvement and the output of the system may be insufficient for mass production purposes.